1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to image processing, and more particularly to a system and method for automatic determination of joint space width from skeleton images.
2. Description of Related Art
Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is one of the most common incurable diseases. Hand radiographs are commonly used to assess joint damage and monitor the progression of disease and response to treatment. Manual measurement of joint space width (JSW) is time-consuming and highly prone to inter- and intra-observer variation.
The methods in the literature use elastic registration or active appearance models for segmentation of hand radiographs. These methods rely on training data, so the method is constrained or biased by the training data, thus resulting in incorrect registration of uncommon hand shapes and inaccurately extracted bone boundaries.